Week 3: Settling in

Friday, 19th September 2008

According to our weekly schedules, our Fridays will be spent at the BAB office in Kep where we'll be doing office work and having feedback meetings with the BAB education officer, Savoeurn, and our volunteer coordinator, Theary. After getting back down to Kep with the two of us on the back of Theary's moto, it turned out that there wasn't any office work for us to do last Friday. However, we did meet with Savoeurn and he had more than enough for us to think about!

During the meeting he explained to us that he needs our help and feedback, from teaching at CLC, in order to help him improve the education system and teaching capacity in Chamcar Bai. For now he's asked us to do some teacher observations to find out some of the strengths and weaknesses of the teachers so he can target these problems in a teacher training workshop which we will be helping to construct some time next month. A number of other things he wants us to think about are the relevance of the text books they use (which are not all that great as Tom and I have already noticed), additional education programmes such as sports, teaching aids and materials, scoring systems and classroom management. I came out of the meeting feeling really glad that Savoeurn is asking us to help him do this as I want to get involved as much as possible with BAB's community development projects while I'm here. I'm sure the ELT course which Mr. Morley ran has given me some basic ideas and knowledge which will be useful to pass on to Savoeurn and I think Tom and I will enjoy drawing up more of our own ideas as we continue to teach and immerse ourselves within the village community. We're definitely up to the challenge!

Savoeurn also asked us if we'd like to get involved with some agricultural work on the plot of land around the Red House. Of course we thought that was an awesome idea so we're setting aside Tuesday afternoon to start preparing some land for growing some fruits and vegetables!

Friday was also when we met Paa, who is now our cook! She makes us really delicious Khmer food and is always smiling. She also has 3 young daughters who came to the Red House one day and made us play blindfolded tag with them.

On Saturday we also met up with JC and some of her friends from the UK while they were in Kep for a couple of days so after an out of the ordinary weekend we had a relatively uneventful start to the week back in the village. Arriving at CLC on Monday morning we were met by empty classrooms and were told that there would be no classes that day or the next because of a child protection workshop. So we turned back to go home where Paa laughed at us trying to handwash our clothes. Here's a photo of where we rinse the clothes and shower. We're managing pretty well so far without running water and electricity. We have a big bucket with a filter in it which we fill up from the pond. It runs pretty slowly but after boiling it it's safe enough to drink so we've stopped bothering to buy 12-packs of water for drinking. We've had a number of Khmer lessons from Theary now which have been incredibly useful, especially at the little market next to the school. We're finding it really easy to pick up Khmer, especially now that we're usually forced to have to use it because there are very few people who can speak English in the Chamcar Bai.

Khmer has also come in handy while I've been teaching English to the Coconut Project ladies in the afternoons. They speak absolutely NO English at all (although are extremely eager to learn!)so it's useful to be able to translate for them a bit, even if they do laugh at my pronunciation! I found it quite hard going for the first few lessons with them because I didn't realise quite how non-existent their English was and my instructions weren't getting through to them. I taught them very simple greetings for the first lesson which they understood but a lesson or two of blank stares later I realised that they can't read any English, let alone write it. I went on to the topic of family on Wednesday which they managed because I kept it really simple and did lots of drawings and some vocab games to do with family. However, next week I'm planning to really bring it back to absolute basics (literally A B C) in order to teach them to read.

As for my classes at CLC, well, they had a monthly test on Wednesday so I only got to teach them properly (for the third time) on Thursday. As opposed to the Coconut Project English classes, wherein I make up my lesson plans from scratch, the CLC students are taught from text books which teach sentences such as "Mother is hanging the clothes" and "Grandfather is sleeping". Tom and I both find these books a bit limiting and restrictive so we've decided to use them as more of a guideline so we expand upon what the book says to teach. We agreed that this is definitely something to mention to Savoeurn!

Thursday also marked the start of our teacher training lessons. Quite a few teachers showed up - roughly 8 - and we asked them to introduce themselves and say 3 things about themselves. We had a discussion on what they would like to focus on in these lessons and then did a lesson around the topic of family which included some speaking exercises so we could figure out how good (or not so good) their English is. Like the Coconut Project ladies, they're all extremely eager to improve their English but it's clear that there is quite a range of levels in the class so Tom and I have decided to split the class into a higher and a lower group and to teach them seperately as of next week. The higher group will consist of Bo, Lalin and Chakrya who are all members of the youth group in the village and can speak good conversational English already but mainly need help with grammar. The rest are no where near as confident and still need to focus on building their vocabulary as well as grammar. Tom and I have made good friends with Bo and Lalin who have offered to show us the village pagoda on Sunday!

Anyway, we've just been given the task of setting up some spreadsheets for Coconut Project order forms now that we're back in the BAB Kep office again for the weekend so I'd better stop now. I'd also better stop before this blog turns into another novel like Tom's previous post - hehehe kidding!

- Joss